In and/or of the World

Last year, the BBC ran a story about children who were taught using the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) system, a highly fundamentalist educational programme used by a small number of faith schools, and by home learners, mostly in the USA but also in Britain.  I meant to write a post about it at the time, but forgot to.  I kept the link however, and decided to address it at a later date.  That day is today.

I don’t wish to discuss the programme itself, although I will say that I consider it unhealthy and unhelpful at best, and I certainly don’t hold with their literalist interpretation of scripture.  It has always been my opinion that there is no better way to manufacture hardened atheists than to smother and saturate children with religion from an early age, which is why I don’t necessarily approve of ‘faith schools’ generally.  On the other hand, I strongly support the concept of specifically and vociferously atheist schools for almost exactly the same reason, since it seems to me that they will be wonderful for producing enquiring, thinking theists.

What I actually want to write about is a quote from the BBC story, from a former student and strong critic of the ACE programme:

“It leaves them [children] grossly unprepared for the real world. They have a view of society and people which is unrealistic, which doesn't match or fit any of the norms of society.”

Well, fair enough I suppose, and I daresay he's correct, but is that really a bad thing?  After all, we are being constantly informed that we live in a consumer-driven, financially and legally unequal, me-first, litigious, grasping capitalist society, full of selfish people so ignorant that they can’t be trusted with the freedom to make their own decisions, conduct their lives, or even form their own opinions without careful supervision.  I believe this to be a deeply negative portrayal of a society that I daresay is no worse than most societies in human history, but certainly no better either, made up of people individually no better or worse than any selection of humans from any other place or time.

However, do we really want our children, or indeed our adults, to have a ‘realistic’ view of society, or to match or fit with its norms?  I am not arguing for simplistic naivety or a willing blindness to the many faults of both society and individuals, but rather in favour of what Someone once said when He told people that they ought to be ‘in the world, but not of the world’.

I have stated before that I am an idealist when it comes to human nature; I believe that people are fundamentally good, even if that good is sometimes deeply hidden, sometimes a spark so faint, buried so deep in a mind and soul so utterly twisted and corroded as to be all but invisible.  That doesn’t change the fact that people are frequently deeply selfish, wilfully ignorant and generally lacking in even the processed cheese spread of human kindness, never mind the milk.  You of course, dear reader, are clearly an exception to this, since you have shown the singular wisdom, mental clarity, and magnitude of spirit to not only be viewing this blog, but to have stuck with this post for so long already.

We should not be blind to the way society is, and we certainly shouldn’t ignore its faults, or pretend that they don’t exist.  They must be acknowledged and confronted; not necessarily in an antagonistic way, but with a view to fixing them, or at least of demonstrating that a ‘more perfect way’ (I apologise for the grammatical inaccuracy, but you must blame Mr. Wesley) is possible, with all the benefits that come with it.

Greed, ignorance, bigotry, selfishness, hatred; are these the ‘norms’ to which we wish to conform?  I have seen it suggested in the past that the church ought to change to adapt itself to society in order to ‘serve it better’.  However, if we as Christians claim to believe in eternal truths, then that is the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing.  To quote Chesterton (again), “Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.”  We may well disagree on exactly what those eternal truths are, citing historical contexts, nuances of interpretation and simple human error for our differences of opinion, but having decided, as organisations and as individuals, we must stick to them, no matter what ‘society’ tell us.

If that leaves us with a view of society that is not realistic, it is only because we think that society ought to be other than it is.  If we do not fit or match the norms of society, then to my mind it simply means that we are getting things right.  Are we grossly unprepared for society?  I would say that society is grossly unprepared for us.

The Inadvertent Easter Chorus

It is a tradition so entrenched in British Protestant Christianity (and Catholicism, for all I know) that it is practically law, that the last hymn to be sung on Easter Sunday is ‘Thine be the Glory’.  There are good reasons for this.  It is a hymn to rock out to, full of vim and vigour, and as long as you have a half-decent organist, it’s one that you can really belt out with all the enthusiasm that you can muster.  It is full of the triumph and victory of Easter, of the surprise twist in the story that everyone already knows, of snatching eternal victory from the jaws of infinite defeat, God’s sudden subversion of His own rules.  It’s a great hymn.

It is perhaps a trifle predictable, and possibly once you have lived a long life, you do not look forward to it.  “Oh no,” you may think as you scan the order of service.  “Thine be the Glory, again?  Ugh!”

I am afraid that I am not yet sufficiently jaded or advanced in years to feel this way.  I do not anticipate ever feeling this way, although one must never say never.

I’ve written before about God’s apparent tone-deafness and colour blindness.  It is impossible for a human being to ever even imagine how things appear from God’s infinite and timeless point of view, but I would love to sit up on the International Space Station on Easter Sunday, with a set of laser-microphones carefully aimed at every church in the UK and plugged into a single set of speakers.  At about 11.20am, I would turn them all on at once.

At about 11.25, or a little before, the first church would begin to sing.

Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son!

Over the next three or four minutes, more and more congregations would begin to join in as they arrive at the closing hymn.  The chorus would swell, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Christians, all singing the same hymn, the same tune, all raising their voices heavenward.  It reaches a crescendo, a song sung in the round with hundreds of parts, a cacophony of voices going at slightly different speeds, in slightly different keys, until individual words can barely be made out, and it is just a roar.  A deaf choir without a conductor, without training, with nothing but enthusiasm for the song.

The first ones have already finished, the majority are almost done.  The stragglers, the churches where the sermon went on a bit long, the large congregations who took a bit longer to take communion are beginning.  More and more voice fall silent and the final blessings are spoken.  The lyrics can now be made out again.

At perhaps 11.45 or 11.50, the last congregation reaches the end.

Endless is the victory, thou o’er death hast won!

And the best part is that to my knowledge, there is no prior arrangement to this.  No clandestine synod sat down and agreed that Easter Sunday services must end with Thine be the Glory.  Indeed, a few maverick congregations, a few clergy who want to do ‘something different’ won’t be joining in.  They’ll have some hymn, no doubt equally good in terms of content and tune, but they will still have missed out.  The ones whose services start early or late will probably have had it, but they will have missed the synchronised singing.

This doesn’t happen at Christmas.  Often the Christmas service will end with ‘O Come all ye Faithful’, but the uniformity is not even close to that of Easter and the national chorus of ‘Thine be the Glory’.

Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in the one bread.  And once a year, without even really realising that we are doing it, we all sing the same song.

The Myth of Christianity

I’ve talked before about how much I enjoy debating theology with people, especially those with very different opinions and beliefs to my own; I find that they help clarify my own thinking wonderfully, and force me to consider things that I have previously taken for granted.  I’ve been having a (polite, intelligent, so far at least) discussion with someone on Facebook recently, and they were asking why they should respect Christianity when it can’t keep its more extreme adherents in line, or even seem to decide exactly what it believes, and when it appears to be the source of so much intolerance and oppression, both historically and in the here and now.  Very valid questions, and ones which I have attempted to answer.

However, it has also resulted in a realisation, and one that I’ve sort of vaguely had before, when thinking about the way some atheists approach religion in general.  Put simply, there is no such thing as ‘Christianity’.  “Why should I respect Christianity?”  “Why is Christianity so intolerant?”  There is no such beast.  Christianity is not an entity, it does not have intentionality, volition or motivation; it is not sentient or biased, it neither thinks nor acts.  There is no such thing as Christianity.  It is a myth, a fiction.  There is no Christianity, there are just Christians.  There’s Christian theology, and Christian ethics, and Christian this, that and the other, but even these aren’t the faceless, oppressive entities that some people like to imagine.  They are the theologies and ethics of Christians.  There is no Christianity.  It is a label for a vast, amorphous mess of beliefs and behaviours that has increasingly become so loose as to be almost meaningless as a word.  Anyone can claim to be a Christian, and apparently no-one has the right to tell them that they’re mistaken.  (This is, perhaps, a rant for another day.)  Certainly as a label it still has its uses, but that is all it is.  It is not a thing in and of itself.

Some Christians are intolerant.  Some Christians are oppressive.  Some Christians have committed atrocities.  Some Christians have forced their beliefs on others, often at the end of a sword or gun, or with the threat of withholding medicine or food or shelter.  Can ‘Christianity’ be blamed for this?  Many Christians are not intolerant or oppressive.  Very few indeed have committed atrocities, or forced conversions through violence, threat or coercion.

Why should you respect Christianity?  There is nothing to respect; it is a chimera.  Why should you respect those Christians who persecute or oppress?  You shouldn’t.  I would hesitate to call them Christians, no matter how well-intentioned or sincere their belief that they are doing God’s will, although ultimately there is only one arbiter for that.  Why should you respect the great many Christians who strive for high ideals, who feed the hungry, heal the sick, shelter the homeless, love the unlovable, bring hope to the hopeless?  The question answers itself.

Fictional Religion

I’ve mentioned a few times before that one of hobbies is table top roleplaying games in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk.  Many of these games revolve around medieval fantasy worlds more or less in the style of The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones; worlds which approximate Earth’s middle ages, but with the addition of elves, dwarves, orcs, wizards, magic, dragons etc.

A vast array of settings have been created to facilitate these games, from professionally published worlds that are specifically designed to accompany one set of game rules, such as the worlds of Glorantha, Harn or Titan, or worlds originally created for novels and adapted for roleplaying, such as Middle Earth, Hyboria or Westeros, to those created by individuals players and games masters (GMs) for their own use and tailored to their own individual tastes.

One thing that almost all of these have in common is the presence of religion in some form or another.  Because these worlds are not our own, neither are the religions.  There is no Christianity, Hinduism or Islam in these worlds, although homages, parodies and approximations appear in many of them.  In early versions of D&D, the ancient Norse and Greek pantheons were offered as gods that the Cleric could worship.  Normally though, fantasy religions are created out of whole cloth, sometimes inspired to a greater or lesser extent by real world religions.

The majority of fantasy religions are polytheistic, in which an array of gods covers various different domains, ideals and concepts.  These are largely created with the game in mind, and presented as gods that player characters are likely to follow.  As such each god has a fairly limited portfolio, and individual cults tend to be fairly straight forward, and while many games outline creation myths and stories covering the relationships between the gods, and outline each god’s teachings and commandments, few settings tend to go into too much depth regarding theologies or the details of regular ceremonies, rituals or services.

This presence of fictionalised religions is one of the things (along with the in-game presence of magic, demons and devils) that alarmed some Christians, and helped give rise to the hysterical religious anti-roleplaying movements of the 80s and 90s (and which still linger amongst some groups).  Needless to say, I share no such concerns.  I have no problem whatsoever with the concept of fictional religions, nor do I think that they trivialise real world faiths.  I have myself created two fictional religions; a standard fantasy polytheism for my Caledain setting, and a religion based on dual gods worshipped together as a single united faith, for use in a fantasy world which currently exists only in my head and a couple of very rough maps, and which may or may not see future development.

This is all a rather long-winded introduction to what I really wanted to talk about, which is the mental exercise of looking at Christianity as if it were a fictional religion.  How would it appear as detailed in the ‘Gods’ section of the D&D player’s handbook, with its scant details and basic information?

I’ve already said that most fantasy religions are both very specific and very poorly detailed, and this is largely because very few roleplay games are going to involve the minutiae of religious observance.  A cleric stating that they will spend an hour or two praying in order to recover their magical powers is about as much as you’re likely to get in the majority of games.  Individual gods will have tightly defined portfolios: Law and retribution; Fire and light; Healing; Plants and animals; Learning and wisdom etc etc.  Fantasy religions are also almost entirely devoid of metaphysics.  Because the gods are known to exist, and frequently intervene in the material world, primarily by providing their priests with magical spells and the ability to perform regular miracles, but also sometimes directly, there is little requirement for it, and for any concept of religious faith as we would understand it.  Games set in a fantasy version of the real world usually portray a very restricted, narrow version of Christianity, suited to the particular tone and requirements of the game (after all, they neither need nor want to be theological or anthropological treatises), and have it as either an oppressive force complete with bloody crusades, ruthless and unscrupulous witch hunters and sadistic inquisitors, or as a protective power, helping hold back evil and defeat monsters (or sometimes both versions at once).  What they actually have though is only the faintest approximation of Christianity as it is recognised by real world Christians.

My main conclusion is that Christianity is simply too large and too vague to function as much of a fantasy religion:

Symbol:  Which one?  The cross?  The dove?  The fish?  The Chi Ro?  We even use boats sometimes...

Associated colour:  Um, white maybe?  Or the rainbow?  Or none at all? 

Favoured weapon:  None really.  The sword? 

Portfolio:  That would be life, the universe and everything… 

Core teachings:  How long do you have?  Pull up a chair… 

It is also wholly counter-intuitive in its concepts of salvation and the Trinity, paradoxical, rich, wide, deep, mixed and baffling.  Many people shy away from this, or use it to claim that it must therefore be false, since no single, true thing could be this way.  Conversely (perhaps even perversely) I see this as being wholly supportive of its claims and teachings.  If Christianity truly claims to best represent the infinite vastness of God, then it must, almost by definition, be paradoxical, counter-intuitive and almost beyond understanding.  If it could be fitted into a column in a rule book, then I would assume that it was indeed fictional.

In short, any theology that could work as a fictional religion in its entirety, and which I could wholly understand, must be far too simplistic to even approximate reality.  That’s obviously not to say that if it doesn’t make sense, it must be true; madness that way lies.  There must be enough solid sense to be able to hang all the apparent vagueness from, a frame to hold up all the concepts that stretch further than the mind is able to go.  There seems to be a belief amongst some people that humans should be able to understand everything, and anything we can’t understand must therefore be false, or can at least be disregarded as unimportant.  I do not agree.  I believe that Christianity has such a frame, and if I can’t understand parts of it, it is only because its canopy stretches far further than I am able to see, and I am content with that.